Athermal photonic circuits for optical on-chip interconnects

Future high data rate communication at chip and board level of computational systems may be well suited for implementation by optical serial communication platforms, derived from the know-how developed for optical fiber communications that currently supports the backbone of internet infrastructure, namely dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) filtering and switching technology. The integration of these optical functions on silicon integrated circuits is expected to leverage the power of ULSI electronics with the ultra-high bandwith available to optical communications, enabling extremely fast and efficient multicore and memory data exchange on vertically stacked integrated circuits (3D-IC). Unfortunately, thermal loads due to variable computational demand on a microprocessor chip may render on-chip optical communications unstable in a read-world, thermally challenging environment. In this chapter, we will discuss different approaches to minimize the effect of thermal variability on the performance of silicon photonics devices.